Why is it so expensive and difficult for us to send things to space? It's because of 2 things, breaking free from the Earth's gravity and surviving re-entry into the atmosphere. All of our rockets, satellites, space probes, etc. have to have a massive amount of fuel and ablative armor. The moon is located in a strategically beneficial spot, right at the top of Earth's gravity well. Once we spend the initial capital to establish a permanent or semi permanent settlement on the moon, the door to space really opens. We can then design our spacecraft without the need for massive thrust and armor, and wont need to spend nearly as much fuel to get around out there. It doesnt take much to move an object through space, and breaking free of the moon's gravity is exponentially easier than breaking free from Terra. And moving resources from the moon to earth is even easier, just a little push and they fall back to earth on their own. With even a tiny colony on the moon to act as a port of sorts, the trouble of monetizing space mining is essentially solved. Not to mention the insane amount of solar power that can be gotten from the raw, unfiltered power of the Sun.

We need to do this guys, we're quickly running out of several natural resources, rare earth metals in particular, which we're only just beginning to rely heavily on (theyre used in just about any battery, especially phone batteries and electric cars) and they can all be found in the asteroid belt. The Moon is the answer, and it's right at our doorstep. If we could get there in the 60's with the computing equivalent of a dollar store calculator, then we have no excuses to not go with today's technology.

>TL;DR- fuck solving world hunger or social issues, lets just go to the moon.

>>55236That's the rub. We need robots to set up all the essential resource harvesting before we get there. Of course if we can do that it's that much more difficult to convince the short sighted that humans need to go at all.

Besides that, present day humans just aren't suited to space. Homo Transfiguro (the cyborgs and bioborgs) will remake their puppets to suit the environment they're moving to as much as possible, and they'll (mostly the cyborgs) have much lower requirements for food, water and oxygen.

And even then I have a feeling those that go out into space will only be people with special interest. When you got a system wide automated infrastructure delivering resources to Earth, why go out there at all?

What are some curious theories on what this all is? Existence in the universe is mind blowing when I sit down and think of what we are really a part of. What are your own theories about what we call 'space' is? Like, what's going on from a bigger perspective? Or smaller?

OP here. very cool thoughts you all have. I am comforted by most of these ideas. I have changed once or twice in my life in such a way that upon looking back at my old life, I could only call it a dream of another perspective. I try to apply that feeling to the universe. I can hold onto my ego, or I can let go and be filled with whatever is right here and flow. Ceaseless action, ceaseless eternity, ceaseless vibration. Change.

The universe is a high-dimensional object constantly rotating within itself.

A complete rotation takes the duration of the life of every universe in existence (current evidence only supporting one), with the big bang being the start of a new rotation. Matter and energy are the result of fluctuations within the universe as it rotates, physical laws are descriptions of how it rotates. Time restarts with each rotation, rotations end and restart after the heat death.

I made up a story for school. Where the universe is a gaint being thats further then the 4th dimension and we live like microbes inside of it and only scens this being in a 3th dimensional way . But its on a scale so big we cant understand further than intended,just like microbes we just live our purpose but cant visualise the being where in. And black holes are like a chemo killing microbes or problems that harm the universe.

I know science doesn't care about our feelings, but tell me of any alternate theories other than everything freezing to death or being ripped to shreds that allows something, anything to keep on going and surviving.

Can we eventually develop the technology that allows us to "jump" to a new, younger or possibly truly unending universe with different laws of thermodynamics to carry ourselves on?

You should take comfort in the fact that you as an individual will die long before any of these things come to pass! So ultimately in the story of Thomas Henderson none of these horrible fates will come to pass, because you will be super duper long dead.

In his late 90s book Hyperspace, Michio Kaku mentions (vaguely and briefly) the possibility that our universe is split between a 4/6D pair of universes contained within the larger 10D universe, and that by the time heat death occurs (or a Big Crunch) occurs, any surviving society might be sufficiently advanced to harness the power of the collapsing universe and create a wormhole into the other one.

The biggest problem is the sheer amount of energy it takes. Mind bogglingly vast, and likely to be near impossible to control.

The fact that anything exists at all is pretty much the biggest - well, it's technically the only problem in science.Yeah, some scientists say things like "nothingness is unstable" and that may well be true. But if we can't figure out how nothing can turn into something - and why it turned into quarks, atoms, stars, planets, galaxies instead of something entirely different - there's no way we can say what will eventually happen.

But whether we're made out vibrating strings or just condensed balls of energy the only thing you need to know is,

My roommates are misinformation masters and even though I know you guys are smarter than this, but they are crafting a masterful troll work about how the ISS is damaged beyond repair. Look for it online. Lives lost money lost. Death on parade. Thy are some fucking idiots.

To live on another planet would the sun and the atmosphere be exactly like earth's? Or could we survive near a red dwarf if the planet was just at the right distance to maintain earthlike temperatures?

>>55232I guess personally I do actually believe there is a formal point of life in the grand scheme, but that's sci fi stuff. I didn't realize it came out so much, but I still stand by it.There must be natural rules to alien life, universal forms, just like the formation of mountains. If evolution is dictated by the environment, similar environments should create similar life. We are more related to horses than we are to deer, but similar habitats, similar place in the food chain, and similar food sources created similar animals, at least morphologically.

Or milk or eggs, for that matter. For every cow slaughtered for food there must be an incredible amount of food grown to sustain the cow. In space stations this may not be feasible due to limited space and resources. We'd be better off focusing energy on hydroponics and a vegan diet would probably be necessary in a long term colony or space station.

Why would you want to destroy a planet? In the movie Dark Star, they blew up entire worlds because "instable planets" could threaten the future colonization of other planets. Is it viable to blow up a planet to mine it as with asteroids? What other use could it have? Elimination of gravitatory perturbances in an Interplanetary Transport Network? Blowing it up wouldn't send tons of material into chaotic orbits?

Sorry for too many questions. I just read about asteroid mining and thought about why not Jupiter with all that hydrogen?

Because Jupiter is terrifying. Anything that approaches it gains ~134,000 miles per hour. To get away you have to give ~that much back.To maintain an orbit just above the atmosphere, any craft would be going 90,000 miles per hour relative to the planet itself.The difference in jupiter's gravitational interaction with the galilean moons' periapsis and apoapsis keeps their cores molten.The ionizing radiation Jupiter emits constantly ablates the surfaces of its moons, giving the larger ones an atmosphere that's constantly lost to space and maintains a detectable ring of plasma from ionized particles that can't escape.

I recently realised that I'm completely fascinated with the early space programmes / the early space technology / the early space race. I would say from the very beginning until the end of the 80's.My request: recommended information, books, documentaries, websites, cheesy anecdotes.. Anything really.

Check out Werner von Braun and his V2 rocket built first for the Nazi party, then Americans extradited him to the US (clearing him of any war-crime charges) and put him to work. There is also a Modern Marvels episode called 'Satellite'. Goes pretty in depth about the whole space race etc...

Personally, I already felt like whatever humans did would amount to nothing in the grand scheme of things anyway. I have absolutely no faith that Humanity won't completely blow each other up in the future and eventually when Earth dies entirely nothing we didw would matter anyway. I don't believe we'll ever colonize another planet or anything, I think we're too stupid as a species for anything that cool.

It's in orbit!I would be lying, if i said i wasn't excited most about the bright spots.Seems like it's a bit of a wait still, until we get clearer images, though.It's pretty fucking cool nevertheless

"The most recent images received from the spacecraft, taken on March 1 show Ceres as a crescent, mostly in shadow because the spacecraft's trajectory put it on a side of Ceres that faces away from the sun until mid-April. When Dawn emerges from Ceres' dark side, it will deliver ever-sharper images as it spirals to lower orbits around the planet."

>>55092I think you're defining the word "novel" too strictly. I'd consider any form of cryovolcanism to be novel because the evidence itself is relatively new and much of it is based on indirect observation.